Traffic microsimulators rely on hand-crafted behavior models that reproduce aggregate flow but miss the heterogeneous interactions between vehicles at signalized intersections. Learned trajectory predictors capture richer interactions but are short-horizon and tend to be unstable when run in closed loop.
arXiv:2606. 17362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous driving has shifted towards end-to-end policy learning, where reliable, interpretable policy evaluation is a fundamental challenge as driving quality is highly context-dependent.
arXiv:2606. 10583v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present NOVA, an autonomous symbolic regression framework that identifies interpretable car-following and lane-change structures from raw trajectory data with minimal behavioral priors.
arXiv:2608.30122v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) driving methods increasingly combine multi-trajectory imitation learning with group-relative policy optimization (GRPO),...
arXiv:2608. 06154v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as zero-shot controllers, but successful trajectories do not necessarily show that decisions are grounded in visual input: simulator dynamics and conservative action priors can produce favourable scores without meaningful perception.
arXiv:2603. 18315v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods rely on manually engineered rewards or sparse collision signals, which fail to capture the rich contextual understanding required for safe driving and make unsafe exploration unavoidable in real-world settings.
arXiv:2607. 13319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-speed off-road autonomy requires precise closed-loop control for a target vehicle while remaining robust across changing terrains.
The paper introduces CoLT-Drive, a 3,536-sample counterfactual long‑tail benchmark for evaluating decision‑level driving affordance prediction, which tests whether models can infer how rare objects affect an ego vehicle’s high‑level actions. It also proposes KPA, a knowledge‑preserving adaptation framework that combines structured prompting, expert merging, and a regime‑aware LoRA mixture‑of‑experts module to improve small VLMs on driving tasks. Experiments show KPA achieves 60.8% pair accuracy on CoLT‑Drive, outperforming the Qwen3‑VL‑2B baseline and LoRA SFT while keeping competitive in‑domain performance.
arXiv:2509. 25533v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Vision Language Models (VLMs) are deployed across safety-critical applications, understanding and controlling their behavioral patterns has become increasingly important.
The paper introduces a plug‑and‑play method that injects traffic‑element signals—such as traffic lights and road signs—into end‑to‑end autonomous driving models with minimal architectural changes. By augmenting several public datasets with comprehensive traffic‑element annotations, the authors evaluate this integration across diverse driving paradigms, consistently improving performance on nuScenes, NAVSIM‑v1, NAVSIM‑v2, and Bench2Drive. The approach achieves a new state‑of‑the‑art result on the challenging NAVSIM‑v2 benchmark, demonstrating the broad utility of traffic‑element awareness.
arXiv:2607. 18637v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generating closed-loop traffic scenarios that are both realistic and controllable is crucial for evaluating autonomous driving systems, especially under rare safety-critical interactions.
LightEMMA is a longitudinal evaluation framework that tests the autonomous driving performance of vision‑language models (VLMs) without fine‑tuning or prompt engineering. Using this protocol, the authors evaluated 15 VLMs from five major families on the nuScenes prediction benchmark and found that larger, more capable models do not consistently outperform earlier generations. The study identifies common failure modes such as overreliance on historical actions and difficulty reconciling conflicting visual cues, underscoring the need for domain‑specific adaptation to enhance VLM safety in autonomous driving.